The present invention relates to a compact, lightweight portable IC card terminal, which can be utilized in the field of electronic money eliminating the need of carrying cash and having a safety excluding the use by third parties, and the field of the electronic commercial transactions including cashless shopping, on-line shopping and home banking.
Electronic money is available as a safe method of electronically settling an account small in amount for purchase of such items as daily goods. In this method, electronic data (also called xe2x80x9cthe electronic moneyxe2x80x9d) having a value as high as cash is stored in an IC card thereby to realize the same immediate account settlement as if paid in cash. In the case where the IC card is used in this way, unlike the conventional credit card or the member card, there occurs the desire on the part of the card user to refer to the contents of the IC card as required. A technique meeting such a need of a portable IC card terminal is introduced in the book xe2x80x9cElectronic Moneyxe2x80x9d edited by Hitachi, Ltd. and published by Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, as a device including a balance reader or an electronic wallet capable of checking the balance of the electronic money or delivering the electronic money between individual persons. The balance reader is a display unit capable of checking the balance in the IC card inserted thereinto. The electronic wallet, on the other hand, is a device capable of displaying the balance in the IC card and capable of delivering money between IC cards inserted thereinto at the same time. These devices, which are portable IC card terminals capable of reading and processing the information from the IC card, has a limited function applicable only to specific type of application.
The balance reader and the electronic wallet, though high in portability, can find practical applications only in specific fields (electronic money application in the case under consideration). In the future, however, it is expected that a plurality of applications will come to be stored in the IC card. For example, applications for various services such as the working management and the health insurance certificate may come to be stored in a single IC card. The prior art cited above fails to take into account a portable IC card terminal meeting the need of the IC card having a plurality of applications stored therein.
FIGS. 22 and 23 show memory spaces 220, 230 of a conventional IC card and a conventional IC card terminal. These memory spaces have stored therein an IC card application 222 and an IC card terminal application 232 meeting the requirement for the services supplied by the IC card. The application 222 and the terminal application 232 have a supplementary relation and concurrently operate, making it possible to supply the services. The memory space of the IC card (IC card terminal) presupposing such a single application is occupied by a device driver unit 221 (231) and a single application 222 (232). The device driver unit 221 (231) provides a microprogram interface for executing the application 222 (232) with hardware (IC card or IC card terminal). The hardware, the device driver unit and the application are correlated so closely that even in the presence of a free space, another application cannot be stored and executed.
The present invention provides a portable IC card terminal meeting the requirement of the IC card having a plurality of applications stored therein. Especially in the case where a plurality of applications are stored in an IC card, unlike in the case where a single application is stored therein as in the prior art, the problem is posed that the maintenance including the registration, confirmation and erasure of the application on the IC card is difficult.
There is provided an IC card terminal comprising a memory for storing an IC card terminal application corresponding to the IC card application stored in an IC card, a CPU for executing the IC card terminal application, and an I/O connectable to an outside network, in which the IC card terminal application supplied through the outside network and the IC card application corresponding to the IC card terminal application thus supplied can be stored in the memory.